INTRODUCTION

Sometimes an older man is a father figure, a replacement Dad, mentoring a younger man’s self-acceptance, proffering wisdom, serving as a role model for the queer world.

Sometimes an older man is a Daddy, demanding a mix of sexual indoctrination and physical domination, training a younger man—a boy, a son, a boi—in the ways of the S/M community, and serving, again, as a role model for a subset of the queer world.

Both gay archetypes, of older seducing/indoctrinating/ succoring younger, figure in this collection. But there are agereversal variations on the standard theme, too, as there are in real life. In Landon Dixon’s arch “Men of the Open Road,” a young hitchhiker knows where he wants to go with older men—and it’s not farther down the road. The younger man has the power to seduce—and to instruct—in Randy Turk’s powerful “Professor Papi”; and, again, older is set free by younger in Jamie Freeman’s elegant “In His Time.”

And, in a variation on a variation, there is Dale Chase’s introspective “Never Say Never Again,” in which a middle-aged man, nurtured by a dead Daddy, seeks renewal in relationships with younger men.

In other stories, “fathers” figure more centrally than—but certainly as erotically as—Daddies: Dominic Santi’s epistolary “Settling In: Letter to Jack” offers an older man’s exasperation with his younger partner’s antics; Mark Wildyr’s haunting “Markey” is about a boy’s hero-worship for the older brother he never had; Gavin Atlas’s on-the-lam “Daddies in Damian” is all about rescuing the lad; David Holly’s liberating “Pop Tingle” is another rescue fable—about saving a boy from the streets to let him realize his potential; and Jack Fritscher’s muscular “Father and Son Tag Team (That Summer! That Camp! That Cousin!),” is a no-hole-barred sexual romp with a summer camp counselor reveling in an older man’s mature power and a younger man’s fresh appeal.

Then there are the hardcore (but always erotically playful) Daddy stories by Xan West, Doug Harrison, Kyle Lukoff, and Jeff Mann, two of them younger authors, two of them veterans of the topic, all of them capturing with been-there verisimilitude the Daddy-son dynamics of dominance and submission, toughness and tenderness, teaching and learning—a genre in gay erotic fiction, a truth in real life.

All of the stories in Hot Daddies are about men in relationships. That wasn’t the intention. But anthologies, within the boundaries of good storytelling, good writing and an editor’s acumen and taste take on a life of their own. No one-night encounters here, then—the Daddies and the sons are in it for the long haul.

 

Richard Labonté Bowen Island, British Columbia